Compliance without carrots or sticks: How international institutions influence national policies.
详细信息
文摘
According to one of the most influential arguments in IR theory, international institutions influence states' behavior by monitoring their compliance with treaties, which in turn facilitates reciprocity. Empirically, however, relatively few treaty organizations are delegated to monitor compliance. My dissertation explains, first, empirical variations in monitoring arrangements, and second, how international institutions can influence state compliance even without any independent monitoring.;On the first question, I examine when and why different actors detect non-compliance and bring it to light in different regimes. I argue that, the presence or absence of low cost monitors, and the common or divergent interests of states and those injured by noncompliance, largely shapes the organizational forms of information systems. Variation on these two dimensions, therefore, explains the variation in monitoring arrangements of different international regimes. I illustrate my theory of monitoring arrangements with a wide range of substantively important treaty regimes, such as the International Monetary Fund, the Non-Proliferation Treaty, the General Agreement on Tariff and Trade, and various human rights and environmental regimes. This theory contributes to the literature by providing a much needed analytical framework to address the empirical diversity of monitoring arrangements.;On the second question, I specify a fundamental mechanism of political control and, accordingly, ways in which international institutions can work through such domestic mechanisms to influence states' compliance decisions. I develop a game theoretic model, in which a government makes the compliance decision in the shadow of competing domestic interests. I demonstrate that a government's choice of the compliance level reflects the electoral leverage and monitoring ability of domestic constituencies. International institutions can facilitate national compliance by empowering pro-compliance constituencies. I conduct case studies of the Long Range Transboundary Air Pollution Convention and the Helsinki Final Act to explore in detail the specific ways in which international institutions indirectly influence states' compliance decisions through domestic constituencies.;This dissertation is primarily an exercise in international relations theory. Specifically, it develops a rational framework to bring both state and nonstate actors into the study of international institutions.